When you think about the social media hiring process, there are four major parts that this could impact:

Discovering your company

Interacting with your career site

The application process

The interviewing/hiring processes

We’ve been asking those throughout the talent acquisition world to think like a candidate. Now more than ever, candidate experience matters, and it’s more complex than ever before. As we go through these components of social media hiring strategies, put yourself in one of your own candidate’s shoes. Would you like or dislike the different parts?

Today’s candidates also expect to be able to find your company on social media. Having an active presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites is a great way to build your employer brand and share what your company is about. For a candidate, this is a great way to begin researching your company, so don’t miss out on a great opportunity!

If candidates can’t easily find your company and begin their research, not only will you compile dislikes, you will also miss out on passive (often better) candidates well before they even think about applying.

Interacting With Your Career Site – Like or Dislike?

Once a candidate reaches your career site, which is still the number one source of hire and best way to promote employer branding, how easy is it to find an open position? If it takes candidates too many clicks to find what they are looking for, their candidate experience will be negatively impacted. This will cost you.

Does your career site have responsive design? Or easy on-site job search? With more and more job seekers becoming mobile-only internet users and almost 8 in 10 candidates conducting their search from a mobile device, having responsive design and simple navigation is a must. If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, you will lose candidates before they even apply.

Take a look at your career site. Is it easy to find jobs? Is the experience awesome on a smartphone or tablet? Is your employer branding front and center? Do you give candidates the option to opt-in to a talent network or job alerts? If these things are missing from your career site, the dislikes will quickly add-up.

The Application Process – Like or Dislike?

Social media hiring strategies aside, is your apply experience mobile-optimized? Today’s candidates expect to be able to apply from any device wherever they are.

As you go through your company’s application, time how long it takes to complete. Few things are as tedious and frustrating as a 45-minute job application that sometimes times out. Asking unnecessary or repetitive questions will only lower the candidate experience. These things will lead to dislikes, or, more realistically, incomplete applications.

The Interviewing/Hiring Process – Like or Dislike?

For many candidates, this is the most stressful phase in the job search process. Job seekers (especially Millennials) want to know where they stand after applying to a position, yet most never hear back. According to CareerBuilder, 52% of companies respond to less than half of the candidates who apply.

Things get even worse during the interview process, where only 27% of candidates are given a reason why they didn’t get hired after interviewing. Not only does this hurt the candidate experience, with the rise of company review sites like Glassdoor, you can bet negative experiences will be shared.

Going by the data, it is safe to say that the vast majority of job seekers would give a “thumbs down” to this portion of the process. Would it be that way at your company?

Minimizing the Dislikes At Your Company

For many companies today, I would expect to see more dislikes than likes for every step of the hiring process. If you are considering the health of your hiring process, it may also make sense to think about the on-boarding process in the same light, because this impacts quality of hire metrics which can guide future decisions and investments in candidate experience.

Poor performance in candidate experience can have big implications for your recruiting efforts and company as a whole. But what can be done to change the “thumbs down” into “thumbs up”?

Take a step back and see the candidate experience and job search process from the eyes of a job seeker. This should be your first step. Doing so will help you see where your hiring process can be improved and will ultimately lead to more likes. The more likes you get, the better your candidate experience will become, which will lead to better hires.

As a side note, if you want to see real-world examples of companies that would garner far more thumbs up than thumbs down, be on the lookout for the winners of the Talent Board’s 2015 CandE awards at the end of the month!

What are your thoughts on social media hiring strategies? Let us know!

2 thoughts on “Social Media Hiring Strategies: What If The Hiring Process Had A Dislike Button?”

I truly wish to see that happening in the Hiring process. We can introspect this way and see what works and what do not. This will improve the branding part and take the candidate experience a long way ahead of Talent demand. Rest, let’s see whose all wanted to be Mark of the Recruiting Industry.

Thanks for the comment Vinay. Not enough companies and recruiters go through their own apply flows to see the candidate experience they offer to job seekers. If they did, the whole experience would improve for both candidates and talent acquisition.